How to Cover a Charlatan Like Trump

Reporters surround Senator Joseph McCarthy and one of his lawyers at a lunch recess during the McCarthy censure hearings in 1954. Journalists of that time also faced the problem of how to deal with a manipulative demagogue.CreditCreditBettmann/Getty Images

WITH presidential debates approaching, we in journalism are locked in a fierce dispute: How should we report on a duplicitous demagogue?

Traditionally, American reporters respond to a controversy by quoting people on each side and letting the public decide. Some of us have argued that this approach hasn’t worked in this election cycle, and that we in the media (particularly some in cable television) have enabled a charlatan by handing him the microphone and not adequately fact-checking what he says.

If a known con artist peddles a potion that he claims will make people lose 25 pounds and enjoy a better sex life, we don’t just quote the man and a critic; we find ways to signal to readers that he’s a fraud. Why should it be different when the con man runs for president?

Frankly, we should be discomfited that many Americans have absorbed the idea that Hillary Clinton is less honest than Donald Trump, giving Trump an edge in polls of trustworthiness.

One commonly cited example of Clinton’s lying is her false claim in 2008 that when she was first lady she came under sniper fire after her plane landed in Bosnia. In contrast, with Trump, you don’t need to go back eight years: One examination found he averages a lie or an inaccuracy in every five minutes of speaking.

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Donald Trump at a campaign event in June.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

Yet I can see how the endless media coverage of Clinton’s email evasiveness might incline some casual voters to perceive Trump as the more honest figure. Of course we should cover Clinton’s sins, but when the public believes that a mythomaniac like Trump is the straight shooter, we owe it to ourselves and the country to wrestle with knotty questions of false equivalence.

In watching the campaign coverage this year, I’ve sometimes had the same distressing feeling I felt in the run-up to the war in Iraq — that we in the media were greasing the skids to a bad outcome for our country. In the debate about invading Iraq, news organizations scrupulously quoted each side but didn’t adequately signal what was obvious to anyone reporting in the region: that we would be welcomed in Iraq not with flowers but with bombs. In our effort to avoid partisanship, we let our country down.

When some in cable TV cover Trump endlessly without sufficiently fact-checking his statements or noting how extreme his positions are, because he is great for ratings and makes money for media companies, we are again failing the country. We are normalizing lies and extremism.

Lately, news organizations have displayed greater resolve, including a blunt willingness to refer to egregious Trump falsehoods as “lies.” I hope we’ve reached a turning point that will frame the debates.

Some traditionalists are horrified at the recent journalistic toughening, and it’s true that fact-checking is a high-wire act for moderators. In a 2012 presidential debate, the moderator Candy Crowley backed President Obama when Mitt Romney accused him of not having promptly called the Benghazi attacks terrorism. In fact, the point was ambiguous — Obama had used the phrase “acts of terror” but wasn’t clearly referring to Benghazi.

So, granted, fact-checking on the fly is difficult, Clinton supporters are trying to goad the media to thump Trump and truth is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. Good journalism is challenging.

Yet playing it straight does not preclude adding value with journalistic judgment — such as, in extreme cases, calling out a lie when we see it. And I believe that debate moderators can press Trump when he lies or evades.

Our job is to share with our audiences what we know. And we all know that Trump will not build a wall that Mexico will pay for (estimates are that it would cost $25 billion). If we know this, we shouldn’t keep it to ourselves.

Skeptics note that more rigorous coverage might not make a difference; Only 6 percent of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in the press. After all, few facts are clearer than that President Obama was born in the United States, yet only 62 percent of American voters say he was born here. Facts may be stubborn things, but so are myths.

Yet even if Trump seems to be a Teflon candidate, to whom almost nothing sticks, we must still do our jobs. We owe it to our audiences to signal that most of us have never met a national candidate as ill-informed, deceptive or evasive as Trump.

What I suggest isn’t the sharp departure from journalistic custom that some accuse me of. In the early 1950s, journalists were also faced with how to cover a manipulative demagogue — Senator Joe McCarthy — and traditional evenhandedness wasn’t serving the public interest. We honor Edward R. Murrow for breaking with journalistic convention and standing up to McCarthy, saying: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent.”

Likewise, in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, it was not enough to quote from news conferences by each side. Great journalists like Claude Sitton and Karl Fleming took enormous risks to reveal the brutality of the Jim Crow South.

Our job is not stenography, but truth-telling. As we move to the debates, let’s remember that to expose charlatans is not partisanship, but simply good journalism.